Sometimes I feel embarrassed, because people see me, see that I’m female, and I worry they automatically assume I’ve got a rotting crab factory somewhere.

You can stop worrying, this never happens. Nobody is going around assuming people will probably smell like fish at normal social distances because of their sex. That’s not a thing.

Do people think vaginas in general might smell like fish, like if you go and stick your nose in one? Yeah, that’s a common factoid or comparison. But anybody who is looking at you and thinking of what your crotch might smell like at a distance of 2cm is not someone you want within 100m of you anyway.

If it really bothers you, take up some kind of smelly shampoo or perfume or something. Then you can know you are thought of as “the person who always smells like peaches” or whatever.

No?

I mean, how else are you meant to play the game actually?

I guess you could be like opening ports just to particular IPs. And you need a game that isn’t Swiss cheese that gets immediately hacked.

But like hackers don’t sort of seep in through port forwards; they need to physically identify and exploit a particular vulnerability.

It sounds like this is the free service charging to access data you already gave them with the expectation it would always be available later. And which might not exist elsewhere.

That’s not fremium, that’s ransomware.

What it is is my attempt to avoid the nonsense biannual massive Ubuntu upgrades.

Really I’ve got “Siduction”, an ostensible distro “based on” Debian Unstable. This is accomplished by just having the Debian Unstable package sources in there, plus a couple others that give you pretty themes.

I expect Debian Unstable to occasionally ship me broken packages, but I’m surprised to have it just generally not have functional migration solutions when the setup goes through major changes. Not because there’s a bug in something, as far as I can tell, but because nobody engineered anything.

dist-upgrade must die.

I spent like three hours I didn’t have the other day trying to bring a Debian Unstable system up to date, it decided to stop every few packages to tell me it failed because the t64 libraries conflict with the regular ones and nobody taught apt how to figure that shit out for me and install the right ones.

Even Ubuntu is like “oh hey there’s a new release, you’re available for three hours straight to, every two to fifty minutes, explain to a TUI dialog that you don’t have an opinion, right? Oh also can you resolve this merge conflict on this config file we think you edited, but you didn’t, by being shown the diff once and then opening nano?”

This is not an acceptable way for this to go.

The underlying scam is the concept of a “cost of living” that’s somehow different in different places, and a minimum wage that can be different for two people who nonetheless might be expected to buy the same thing.

Anything that touches this concept and tries to accommodate instead of destroy it is going to inherit its foolishness.

IMHO it’s already dead.

Nobody’s made RAM actually targeting the specs in the standards for years; the sticks ship with built-in overclocking settings for one or the other proprietary system, and the boards expect the sticks to already be on their Qualified Vendor List to actually work right. The interface between the RAM and the motherboard is ceasing to be a legitimate extension point.

There’s two people who make CPUs, not to any spec but to work with their own other chips that need to already be on the board, which are then driven by firmware software basically supplied by the CPU makers. When the CPU makers update their base firmware bundles, the board makers skin and ship it. In the distant past, one could slot competing CPUs from different vendors into the same board, and they would execute BIOS software fundamentally under the control of the board makers. The interface between the CPU and the board has long since ceased to be a legitimate extension point.

The real remaining extension point is PCIe, and since its dominant use is to attach exactly one ever-widening GPU from one of two (or perhaps now three! How spoiled for choice we are!) manufacturers, each year fewer slots are provided. The target customer only needs one, and it needs as much physical clearance as humanly possible. A case will have 7 or 8 slots on the back and a board will provide two slots to plug anything in, one to actually use and one to be able to claim that there’s more than one slot. And each year there’s less stuff to put in there (who buys sound cards?) and more stuff (fast networking, wifi, fancy USB) is integrated into the board.

And all these components have started to acquire fancy molded plastic and metal casings, to the point where it’s not clear why they need a separate enclosure around them.

So the net result is you obtain one fancy shrouded box from Lenovo, or you purchase two fancy shrouded boxes and plug them together, and you call the result a “PC”. And then on the software side it’s a terminal for a Microsoft account, which you use to run a client for fetching from Steam, which you use to load client software for talking to live services. And now the people orchestrating all this are wondering why they bother actually mailing you the boxes.

This is very deeply not personal computing.

I saw NTSYNC and was obligated to reply with the complementary 90s boy band.

How the Backstreet Boys Taught me to Code

Why do you think people got so into T posing?

Still waiting on the improvements to BACKSTREET_BOYS to get merged.

Pihole or other network-based ad blockers might be able to do a lot of the same things. Or an ad-blocking DNS set in the phone’s settings. But I don’t know of anything else that has the same on-device VPN implementation as the DDG tool.

I’ve had pretty good results with Wings3D actually, as opposed to Blender. For proper CAD you can try Solvespace, which also sucks but at least has so little to it that you can learn to use it if you remember the idea of solving systems of equations at all.

You have methods that amount to making yourself an online job, or an offline job with a lot of online communication (independent software contractor, commission artist, author, sex worker, online course teacher, Etsy knit hat manufacturer, etc.).

You also have various flavors of capitalism, which may not count, as you did say “legitimate”. But if you already have ten million dollars, you can spend lots of time researching stocks and evaluating pitches for businesses and maybe get a better return than you would otherwise, all online.

And then you have merchanting, wholesaling, or furniture-flipping type approaches: buy stuff online, refurbish it or repackage it in smaller quantities, translate all its documentation correctly, vouch for its quality and fitness for purpose, take nice photos of it, market it, sell it, deliver it, and support it.

I don’t think ActivityPub is set up for one server storing and forwarding a whole feed of everything, like Usenet. Right?

But you can, in fact, be too careful. Availability is one arm of the security triad.

If whatever complex configuration you have set up to avoid exposing something to the Internet is incompatible with something and what you wanted to do can’t be done, or if you look and see that setting all that up would be too hard and don’t bother to expose the service at all, then your security posture is incorrect because your service is just as unavailable as if someone else broke it.

That certainly sounds like a thing you would want, nay need, to fix.

It would definitely reduce the attack surface. And even though Windows has “security” issues patched all the time, rarely are they ones so severe that you can just roll up to a machine and send it a weird HTTP reply and get admin access. Usually it’s stuff like if you have a shortcut file on disk it gets to run code when you look in the folder, or something. Not great for working with downloads, but hard to exploit unless at least one other thing happens (like visiting a malicious page, which then starts a download that the browser accepts).

But the browser calls out to the OS to do a lot of stuff (render images, render fonts, play sounds, etc.). It mostly assumes the OS can do those things without popping open a remote shell because too many emojis were rendered in a row or something. That is not always true, and when it isn’t you want an OS patch to fix it before you go on a site where someone can post the Magic Emoji That Hacks You.

But you are right that you can browse around trustworthy websites on an unpatched system behind a decent firewall for quite a while before you notice something bad happening. But also, a lot of bad things can have been happening for quite a while before you notice.

I think it has something to do with your brain playing both sides of the dream. You are coming up with how to react, but you are also at the same time coming up with what happens next. So if you dream a lion and you are like “uhoh, what if the lion tried to chase me, that would be a problem, I’d have to run away,” then you’re now dreaming about a lion that is chasing you and how you are running away.

Probably.